A call center is capable of receiving, generating, processing, and transmitting calls, such as telephone calls, and other information. A particular type of call center may be referred to as an automatic call distributor (ACD). A call center typically has multiple agents answering incoming calls and participating in outgoing call campaigns. Each agent may be assigned to a particular group, such as an inbound group or an outbound group.
During an outbound campaign, a system is provided for initiating the outbound calls and controlling the rate at which the calls are initiated. Additionally, this system must identify answered outbound calls and connect those calls to available agents. Various call progress tones and other signals provided on the telephone line indicate the status of the outbound call. However, the tones and signals used by various telephone networks can vary among different countries.
Existing call centers are capable of detecting tones and voice from a single country (e.g., the United States). In these systems, it is not possible to detect tones and voice from any country other than the country for which the call center is designed. Thus, the call center cannot be used to make calls to multiple countries, or a country different than the designated country. In this situation, a separate call center designed for use with a different country is required to make calls to another country.
Existing call centers use a separate system (e.g., a separate call switch) for each country. Each system is configured to identify the tones and signals used by the telephone network of a particular country. Therefore, if a particular call center must support outbound calls to six different countries, then six separate systems must be provided to support all possible call tones and signals. Since the separate systems are dedicated to a particular country, the system cannot accommodate calls placed to a different country. Thus, if a particular system has reached its outgoing call capacity, no additional calls can be initiated to that system's country because the other systems are dedicated to a different country. Even if other systems are not being used, they cannot process calls to a country other than the country for which they are configured to communicate. These existing call center designs often result in an inefficient utilization of resources.
Existing call center designs are particularly inefficient when a particular outbound campaign places all calls to the same country. In this situation, only one of the country-based systems is used to handle the outbound calls. The remaining systems are unused during this particular outbound campaign.
It is therefore desirable to provide a system for processing outbound calls that is capable of identifying the tones and signals used by telephone networks in multiple countries.